A CITY in Florida has confirmed hackers seeking to extort money were responsible for crippling its computer systems earlier this week.
But officials in Pensacola have yet to decide whether they will pay a reported $1 million ransom.
If they do opt to fork over the money, they may have to dip into Pensacola city coffers; the city of about 52,000 in Florida’s Panhandle – whose annual budget is roughly $245m – is not insured for such an attack.
Obtaining it in the future is “something that our risk manager will certainly be looking into,” said city spokeswoman Kaycee Lagarde.
Lagarde confirmed that ransomware was behind the attack that brought down the city’s computer network over the weekend, less than a day after a Saudi aviation student killed three US sailors and wounded eight other people at a nearby naval air station.
The FBI has said the attacks were not connected.
The cyber security blog BleepingComputer reported earlier this week that a group behind a ransomware strain known as Maze claimed responsibility for the attack and was demanding $1m from the city.
In emails exchanged with the website, the Maze hackers claimed they had stolen documents from the city but did not say whether they had given Pensacola officials a deadline to pay for them or if they had threatened to release the documents if they did not pay.
BleepingComputer editor Lawrence Abrams said the Maze operators had authenticated their identity with proof of a different hack and by posting snippets of email exchanges with his blog on a dark-web payment site.
City officials declined to discuss who might have been responsible.
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